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NewYorkCountryLawyer (912032) writes In Authors Guild v Hathitrust, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has found that scanning whole books and making them searchable for research use is a fair use. In reaching its conclusion, the 3-judge panel reasoned, in its 34-page opinion (PDF), that the creation of a searchable, full text database is a "quintessentially transformative use", that it was "reasonably necessary" to make use of the entire works, that maintaining four copies of the database was reasonably necessary as well, and that the research library did not impair the market for the originals. Needless to say, this ruling augurs well for Google in Authors Guild v. Google, which likewise involves full text scanning of whole books for research.

"So what is the point of scanning and making the info from the scan available if they don't reveal anything from the text?"

The same point behind card catalogs at the library, or Google: so that you can find sources that have the kind of information you are looking for instead of trying to buy all of the books everywhere on the off chance that any one might have what you are looking for.

The other main reason would be to prepare the work for public release before it's eventual copyright lapse. That's assuming that Google is still around in 500 years (at least the way copyright extensions are handled it'll likely be at least that long).

I think you lost your point somewhere. So are you upset about all this or not. Me, I am fully in support of OCR getting a LOT more powerful, and Captcha's are going to become useless. I am also in support of scanning and making the info from the scan available like searching Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and it reveals that, "yes, the words OFF WITH HER HEAD" appear, and appear on page 78.
However, I seriously doubt we will end up with an entire book of those stupid wavy words and superimposed squiggles

The summary misses a key point. Yes they scan and store the entire book, but they are _NOT_ making the entire book available to everyone. For the most part they are just making it searchable.

Agreed that it's not in the summary, but as you correctly note, it's just a "summary". Anyone who reads the underlying blog post will read this among the facts on which the court based its opinion: "The public was allowed to search by keyword. The search results showed only the page numbers for the search term and the number of times it appeared; none of the text was visible."

It doesnt bode well for Google as Google are not using scanning for research, they are a publicly listed corporation scanning books to profit from showing the public books and adverts and selling the resulting data to anyone who will pay them with the authors getting 0 compensation.

They are not showing the whole book, but a teaser, limited amount of text or pages. kind of like showing you a movie trailer is not like showing you the entire movie. If anything Google is engaged in free advertising to those who are bound to profit from new copy sales. And then again there are those who just get by on the promotional material, without making a full purchase. A lot pf porn picture samples are like that, it says on them they are a sample, and real images have superhigh resolutions. When was

I was just thinking about this topic driving home today. How a local discount store used to carry Dorco Pace 4 shavers, and I've used them for like the past 5 years, and they last like 6 months a package of four at least, for something that used to be a lot cheaper than the standard Gillette or Schick or Bic stuff, but now they've switched to Dorco Pace 6, which is more expensive, and it sucks! I mean I used it but it does not go at it strong enough, you have to scrape your face a few times with the Pace 6

But what good is a scanned book if it's available but you can't actually access it? Almost everything since 1930 is under copyright, and we're legally denied access to this wealth of information, including works under copyright but orphaned. Scanning books, digitizing them, making them searchable -- and then what? If you can't get the book, what good is it? Almost all books before digital typesetting are available online only in bad-photocopy scanned PDFs, not even full text.

But what good is a scanned book if it's available but you can't actually access it? Almost everything since 1930 is under copyright, and we're legally denied access to this wealth of information, including works under copyright but orphaned. Scanning books, digitizing them, making them searchable -- and then what? If you can't get the book, what good is it? Almost all books before digital typesetting are available online only in bad-photocopy scanned PDFs, not even full text.

A sane society would strip the copyright from any book that is not currently available digitally, if the copyright holder (supposing the copyright holder can even be found) has no plans to make it available digitally in the next year, and revert it to the public domain. Then Google - and anyone else - could do whatever they wanted with the text.

A sane society would have a 14 yr copyright, a president and congress who actually listen to the masses and only serve 4 or six yrs, a Bruce jenner who never married Kris Kardashian because told him it would be his worst mistake ever, a childless Pattie Mallette, a RIAA that served its artists giving them 80% of the money an album earned and didn't attack the people who shared it, muslims and jews who didn't hate each other, women, gays and want to explode themselves in crowded places, a US that didnt spill